diapause

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The Word of the Day for November 28 is:

diapause   \DYE-uh-pawz\   noun
     : a period of physiologically enforced dormancy between 
periods of activity

Example sentence:
     The research team was thrilled when they successfully 
hatched some 300-year-old crustacean eggs found in a state of 
diapause at the bottom of a local pond.

Did you know?
     "Diapause," from the Greek word "diapausis," 
meaning "pause," may have been coined by the entomologist 
William Wheeler in 1893. Wheeler's focus was insects, but 
diapause, a spontaneous period of suspended animation that seems 
to happen in response to adverse environmental conditions, also 
occurs in the development of crustaceans, snails, and other 
animals. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates exercised poetic license and 
gave the word a human application in her short story "Visitation 
Rights" (1988): "Her life, seemingly in shambles, ... was not 
ruined; ... injured perhaps, and surely stunted, but only 
temporarily. There had been a diapause, and that was all...."